Murphy, it turns out, was very much not the debonair gentleman thief as played by Don Stoud in Live a Little, Steal a Lot.

Jack Murphy, the handsome surfer-playboy jewel thief — that’s what Nora Ephron would have you think, anyway — died last week at age 83, from heart failure.

Murphy was born in LA but belongs to Florida. That’s where he made his mark as a surfer, winning the ’62 Daytona Championships and briefly running Murf’s Surf Shop in Indialantic.

And that’s where he began thieving professionally, as a B&E creeper in Miami Beach, stealing high-end art from rich people’s beach homes and selling the pieces back to their insurance companies.

In 1964, Murphy and two accomplices broke into the American Museum of Natural History in New York and stole the Star of India sapphire, plus a big handful of other precious gems, and “Jewel Heist of the Century” stories ran coast to coast.

Three days later they were caught, and Murphy served 21 months in Rikers.

My resentment against Jack Murphy began with the fact that his perfect “Murf the Surf” nickname sounded too much like “Murphy,” and I don’t want anybody or anything stepping that close to Rick Griffin’s sweet-faced cartoon grom, who represents all of our surfing innocence.

(In 2013 I described Murphy as the Hello Kitty of surf culture, meaning he was sweet, popular and beloved, and I stand by that call.)

What really put me off Jack Murphy, though, was looking deeper into his criminal history while writing Encyclopedia of Surfing in 2000. Murphy, it turns out, was very much not the debonair gentleman thief as played by Don Stoud in Live a Little, Steal a Lot.

He was a stone-cold killer who in 1967 took a pair of female crime accomplices out for a boat ride, beat them to death, knifed opened their torsos, tied them to concrete blocks, and threw them overboard.

The East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame elected Murphy on their first ballot, in 1996, noting his competition wins and his surf shop.

The open-and-shut double-murder conviction somehow went unmentioned.

It shouldn’t matter, but Jack Murphy also looks like Montgomery Burns’ favorite son.

(Like Matt Warshaw’s flavour? This obit comes from his weekly mail-out, sent to all good surfers who cut three bucks a month to subscribe to his bottomless archive of surf history. Join here. And if you want a little more, listen to Matt, along with Tyler and Jamie Breuer on their Sunday Joint podcast here. Fascinating.)

"I was off my board and on top of the bloody thing. It was like I was submerged on a rock, it was so hard and rough."

Three days ago, foilboarder and noted local surfer Christian Bungate was hit by a Great White at the site of last weekend’s Tweed Heads Pro, the animal, which was described as a “tank”, leaving behind a tooth in the foil’s carbon fibres. 

Bungate, was, initially at least, loathe to talk to the press, preferring, according to friends, a few days to process the event.

The hit came two weeks after Nick Slater was killed by a Great White at the Superbank, forty-five minutes drive north, four months after Rob Pedretti was killed by a  Great White at Kingscliff, ten minutes drive north, one month after longboarder Chantelle Doyle was pulled out of a Great White’s mouth by her husband at Port Macquarie, a few hours south, and two months after teenager Mani Hart-Deville was killed by a Great White at Wooli, a couple of hours south. 

So, yeah, Bungate knew it was a close call. 

Speaking yesterday to the ABC’s Gold Coast bureau, Bungate said he was fifty yards off Cabarita Beach on his foil when he saw a shadow alongside him. 

Harrowing?

Yeah.

“It was like there was an oil slick next to me, it was so big. It came up so slowly, and I literally shit myself and kicked it as hard as I could with my right leg.”

The White hit his board and knocked him into the water.

“I was off my board and on top of the bloody thing. It was like I was submerged on a rock, it was so hard and rough.”

Then,

As he managed to scramble off, the predator came at him with jaws gaping, but bit the board instead. Mr Bungate was convinced if he had been on a standard surfboard rather than a foil board, which has a 70cm keel and wings instead of a fin, he would be dead.

“I’m 100 per cent sure if I was on a normal surfboard it would’ve given the shark clear access to get straight back at me and it probably would’ve taken out my stomach,” he said. “Instead it caught the wing of my foil board, hence why there’s a bloody tooth in it. I left my board and I crawled up the beach and I lay on my stomach bawling my eyes out.”